Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday November 07, 2009 @01:20AM
from the will-you-rage-over-rage dept.

AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"

But given the mess that has grown up around MW2, it should be pretty clear that the attempt to leave dedicated servers behind is not being taken well. The mechanism in use there seems destined to cause problems for users, and the fluidity available from dedicated servers can't be easily replaced by any system that has users hosting servers. It may be that hordes of virtual servers are the future of dedicated servers, but that's still a far better option than things like a five-second pause while the players' systems figure out who is taking over next.

If there's anyone that I trust to come up with a workable technical solution, it's John Carmack, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.

Battlefield Heroes uses a similar setup and for the most part servers are a nebulous thing the match making servers put you on. Because for the most part real people don't run the servers admins are less common. There's less incentive to rent a servers (through approved resellers) because the communities that usually grow up around more active servers or more skilled players don't really form. My friends might be good but when we join a game it could be just about anywhere, if we even bother to join. One wa

The question is, why not add support for both matchmaking and dedicated servers with a browser? I would imagine it's not *that* difficult to program in a server browser as well, seeing as how companies have been doing it for more than a decade. It might require some more resources, but dedicated servers will almost always offer a better experience than a listen server and that's why it's worth it. Whatever benefits matchmaking may bring to the table are also available for the end user.

It's worth pointing out that the RAGE demo at QUAKECON was done on a 360 controller. That should be a pretty strong sign that this is a console port design decision, that will ultimately affect the PC port. Let's take a look at console games with PC ports that use the "no dedicated server" model!

The downside to no dedicated servers is that you lose the community aspect, community organization becomes MUCH harder, and the game doesn't live on as long. See also: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server. Incredibly frustrating, and I'm not really sure game/community mechanics have progressed far enough to allow the community/communities to grow up around the game that you want to push further away from dedicated servers. The one console game that I saw with a decent community setup was SOCOM 3 for the PS2; it had clans and messageboards, a messaging system and a somewhat steam-like buddy system/join buddy's game function.

Case in point: Rage is a console game, with console server matching system. The fact that it's coming out for the PC means that it's simply going to be a piss-poor PC port of a console game, and last time I checked, PC-ports of console games were fucking terrible (see also: Borderlands).

The graphics are better on PC, the controls are better on PC, and the online elements integrate nicely on the PC.

-Better graphics? yes, with PC 2x the speed of Xbox you get better gaphics

-the controls are better on PC? are you kidding???? until the patch you couldnt use mouse wheel cos it would glitch and block you out of weapon change functionality, not to mention a HUGE controller LAG (even when your gfx hits 60fps) due to mouse input aliasing and a bugged vsync.

-and the online elements integrate nicely on the PCagain WHAT? cant invite friends to my session due to game publisher running ONE overloaded server for

I'll chime in with this with a non anonymous post, because it needs to be said. Seriously, don't use it. If you're quoting someone else, then fine. But it's just a version. Calling it an SKU reeks of trying too hard.

See: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server.

We have an INX dedicated server we can switch between Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. Actually using it is a pain in the arse though. We haven't used the feature of associating it to our steam group since they added it, because it didn't support grouping up in a lobby and choosing gamemode, level, characters etc before playing. You had to restart the server to change gamemodes! Setting a search key and force_dedicated_servers list seem to work though, so we've been using that.

Is I'd think you'd want to go the other way. Not just have dedicated servers, but allow for dedicated servers for consoles too. UT3 does just that, you can get a server that runs on PCs, but is designed to serve the PS3 version of the game. So you can have dedicated servers even for console games. Great idea IMO. You allow for peer to peer games, but support dedicated servers for all platforms. That way people can play how they like. Also dedicated servers are clearly loved by a non-trivial amount of people

You have to know the server's unique identifier, type it into the console, choose "best available dedicated", and then the group will follow you to that specific server. Which is what we were doing the other night, since one of our group of 4 only gets a good ping when it's a west coast server. If you simply select "best available" and hit go, it might pick somewhere in Kansas, which is going to ping badly for us in Texas, Florida, and the guy who only pings well to west coast servers. But it's the best ave

Just like we need another slashdotter's disproportionate observation as id provided the tech, while Raven provided the fun/or lack of fun factor of the new game. It'd help your argument more if you would read up on who's actually putting their hand into the cookie jar of the new sequels.

Since when has Carmack been a designer or producer? Hint: he isn't. He's in charge of the technical stuff, the engine. If that sucks, by all means blame him. But a crappy game on top of a nice engine means that id Software sucks, not Carmack.

Yes and no, it would be considered a module of the engine if you will. If programmed correctly, the interfaces should be such that you can swap out one method of networking with another and the game wouldn't know the difference. You should be able to completely spoof being networked at all and have no issues. If programmed incorrectly (like gears of war and gears of war 2), then the core engine and network could be coupled together in a way that it is not easy to modify the netcode without breaking somethin

Is the networking/interconnection system part of the engine, and if not, would the former be part of Carmack's responsibilities, too?

Yes, it is. Most major game engine packages, including IDTech contain a networking layer. In fact, John Carmack was the guy who pretty much pioneered the client-server model for graphical games back when he made Quake.

However I've never had a major problem with his game's network layers. The issue is only that the game itself (content and gameplay wise) has been fairly bland for the last few iterations. If what the grandparent post is saying is correct, John Carmack is only responsible for the technical side, (including rendering and networking) and not the game experience itself. However, if "Masters of Doom" is correct, that is simply not the case as that book attributes most of the decisions as to the focus on recent games to John Carmack. It argues that it is the direct consequence of his conservative policy in game design that lead to Quake2, Quake3 and Doom3 being how they are, for better or worse.

The grandparent is claiming that John Carmack's technical record is unblemished and if he says P2P hosting is the way of the future then he should be given the benefit of the doubt and not questioned until he either recants, delivers a bad implementation or proves not to be able to implement this system in reasonable time. Even if he is responsible for the boring combat of Doom3, that suggests nothing about his ability to write game networking layers. I wrote a lot of the network system of a commercial game engine. My personal reaction towards this statement is to acknowledge that past history suggests that he will be able to deliver something very good and there is nobody who can really call him wrong until they have tested his implementation. I however, have not abandoned the client-server model and neither should anyone simply on the words of John D Carmack without thinking exactly about the priorities and requirements of their game.

I know nothing about network programming but the benefits of the server/client model are obvious. P2P can only potentially beat server/client in one scenario: 1 on 1 play. Any more players than that, and it becomes inefficient.

If I'm playing a game and say 3 others are in visual range, I have to tell 3 others over the network where I am, what I'm doing etc. You might be able to get by with P2P with say 4 players, but it just does not scale period.

Back in the original Doom days, John Cash and his friends who worked for Novell used to play deathmatch games on the corporate network in the evenings. When they discovered that the Doom network code was horrible, Cash sent Carmack an email pointing this out.

Carmack responded by sending over the source code (which had been written for id by a contractor), asking Cash to fix it. Basically a 'put up or shut up' situation.:-)

The result, after a few mostly sleepless nights was a totally rewritten network layer which got used by the later Doom versions.

This experience made Cash figure out how a networked game should work, so over the next 2-3 years he did a presentation every year at Novell's Developer Conference (later called BrainShare), the title was something like "How to write networked games".

Another year later, after Carmack had hired Mike Abrash to help with the low-level optimization of the sw 3D engine for Quake, they hired Cash to write the nextwork and AI code.

After Quake 3 shipped, Cash left id for a more relaxed environment, moving to Blizzard who were working on this new massive multiplayer game at the time.

Afaik John Cash is now the chief programmer for WOW.

Terje

PS. I've known Mike since about 1985 and I worked with John Cash for a year in 1991-92.

I wouldn't call ~200,000 people a day between only three games from ONE COMPANY when the most populous of those three games averages ~80-90K a day peak users despite being about 5 years old a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. I'd call that proof of how important dedicated servers and proper mod support are.

I run a Half Life 2: Deathmatch server [inx-gaming.co.uk]. Looking at the Steam stats, only 2,100 people have played it today. If I look at my stats site [inx-gaming.co.uk], though, I can see over 3,100 people have passed through my server in the past month! Now either every single person that plays deathmatch has used my server, or the number of deathmatch players is a hell of a lot higher than daily peaks would suggest.

I will also say that without the community generated by having enthusiasts run their own servers, many people wouldn't bother to play the game.

They don't want people like you as customers. They want people that toss a game after one month and go buy the next big shit. They want to limit a game's life span by being able to shut of things like multiplayer. They're not making money when you are playing something you already paid for.

I think it is just more proof that they are doing their best to kill the communities and mods so they can shove DLC down our throats. All my favorite games were made favorites NOT by the designers, but by the communities and mods that built up around them and gave me MORE for my money and extended my fun, not screwing me over so they can "maximize profit potential".

No mods? No money from me. No dedicated servers? Again no money from me. If we PC gamers get together and make damned sure that any game that screws us over rots on the shelves, while buying up the ones that treat us right, maybe then we won't end up in x360 hell, which is what they seem to be pushing us towards. I don't want a damned 360, thanks ever so much!

Yeah, on one hand I still want to support titles which provide fun single player gameplay, even if they rape the online experience (see Modern Warfare 2; at least; I'm presuming that the single player experience will be solid and that it didn't go to consoleville as well). On the other, I would almost like to try driving games that do this shit off of our platform, except that considering what a bastard child that PC SKUs are already treated as, I'm concerned that the majority of the publishers will just sa

But if you support those that have single player "even if they rape the online experience" then that will just prove to the publishers they should make the PC even more of a "walled garden o' poo" for games. Remember most of these PHBs frankly don't give a shit if you can actually have fun with their game or not, it is all about "maximizing profit potential" and other buzzword bingo bullshit.

They want to turn the PC into an x360 because they think that will kill piracy and let them shove DLC down your thro

>I think it is just more proof that they are doing their best to kill the communities and mods

They can't be that stupid? Valve make a shit-load of money of Counter-strike(:source) and Day of Defeat:source, which all started out as mods (I was only an avid video gamer for a while so I'm sure there are lots more examples). Additionaly many people only buy thier latest game for the mods and to play with the community that has moved to them (i only got hl2, to play dod:s, to play dod with the clans i knew)

Don't forget we are talking about PHBs here, so yes, they could be THAT stupid. Hell I would argue that mods can even make a stinkbomb into something worth playing, if you would like an example the Delta Force series of games. By themselves they are your typical bargain basement trash, with lousy AI and even worse weapon balance, but they have TONS [dfbarracks.com] of mods out there for the Delta Force series that turn what was a pile o' poo into an actually enjoyable game, both offline and on. Try "Shock N Awe" or "Black O

Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?

I'd argue this is less about piracy and more about upselling DLC to the PC crowd, which they can't currently do as easily as they'd like when gamers have dedicated servers and mod tools to extend the life of the game.

A lot of today's FPSes seem to prefer a ping of less than 100ms. Many of them become very frustrating to play at 150ms -- I can only assume this is due to whatever cheat protection they use forcing them to use less and less lag compensation, and forcing them to run less of the simulation locally.

I live on the west coast, and a lot of the people I play with live on the east coast. So when we have the option of buying a server, we get one somewhere in the middle so that we all have pings in the 50-100ms range instead of the 150-200ms range. Taking this option away will really, really suck.

My earliest experience with gaming was staying up until the wee hours of the morning playing Action quake2 and rail-instagib CTF with those laser hooks they had. It was punishingly brutal back then, you could die 3 times in less than a second on some servers, and hackers could run rampant until an admin banned his ass. It was all worth it once you got that midair lag-shot on the top player on the server. These were all community supported mods running on dedicated servers. No servers, no mods, no community. This will only end in tears, or pirates, or both.

Become demos? Even the original Quake was mainly an engine demo. The single player game was painfully dull. In multiplayer it was quite fun, but there were lots of mods that were better. And multiplayer worked fine with the demo, you just didn't get the lightning gun (which was rubbish anyway) and a lot of mods worked fine with the demo too. The only reason that I bought Quake was a lot of maps for Team Fortress used resources from the full game so they wouldn't work with the demo...

i really liked the single player for the first Quake, complete with nine inch nails and all. Have to keep these things on context though, considering that FPS's were in their infancy at the time. Quake to Bioshock is like the difference between cave paintings and high italian renaissance art.

Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?

Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.

That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.

Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.

With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.

With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.

That didn't sound very respectful. I think that JC was implying that there is no technical reason for dedicated servers anymore. With the CPU/GPU horsepower available, there is no reason why you can't host a game and stil

Since when has hosting a game impacted frame rates? In fact, I distinctly remember dedicated servers having a very, very low footprint as far as CPU and RAM usage went. That may have changed in recent years, I don't know, but with older games that's what I remember.

One of the first games I played online a lot was Heretic II. I did not have a particularly good computer, and I hosted a dedicated server and played on the same computer just fine.

There are still a few reasons for wanting a dedicated server. You can have a dedicated server that keeps running when the person who started the game gets bored. With a proper p2p architecture that can still happen, but it's difficult to get right. With a client-server architecture, the person who started the game quitting generally leads to everyone being kicked off. With a dedicated server you can have a game running 24 hours a day and just have people drop in and leave when they have some time.

Well, a number of them actually. One would be bandwidth. Lots of people don't have good bandwidth on their connection, especially upstream. The majority of consumer connections in the US are highly asymmetric, way more download than upload. So it is easy to find someone without sufficient bandwidth to easily host a game since they are likely to be on a cheap consumer cable connection. Now compare that to a dedicated server. If it is good, and the ones people come back to are, it'll be hosted in a datacenter

Decentralisation = the people doing it by and for themselves, on their own terms, at low or no cost.

Centralisation = the suits doing it for you, charging you through the nose for it, dictating exactly when, where, and how it's going to happen, and the brainless masses referring to it as being a good thing.

Some of said sheep will probably respond to this very post, in order to tell me I'm wrong.

That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.

For what it's worth, most people are playing Borderlands online now using GameRanger for exactly this reason, because it eliminates all these problems. Gearbox has unofficially recommended it as a solution as well.

For what it's worth, most people are playing Borderlands online now using GameRanger for exactly this reason, because it eliminates all these problems. Gearbox has unofficially recommended it as a solution as well.

Nobody I play with even heard of gameranger. So, we tried it. Guess what - It didn't help the Borderland's online mode work.

a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, [...snip...]. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.

As a forefather of modern gaming he doesn't know what gamers want? Interesting assertion. I suppose the word design can be used in many contexts but still I wouldn't be so sure he doesn't know what gamers want in any of those contexts.

Mate if you can't port forward / open firewall ports to get borderlands to work, then how are you getting any other port forwarding requirements to work for anything else?

took me less than 5 minutes and most of that was spent in notepad cutting and pasting lines out of access lists (in addition to static NAT mappings, I am running a CBAC firewall so I need to open that up in my router as well), for a typical point and click home router gui I can't see how it could have been difficult. Esp if you have a DMZ

Or the fact that there are so many hidden settings only configurable by editing files which are in a location you'd never think to look on your own (My Documents\My Games? Seriously? Who the fuck does that?). Disabling mouse smoothing is absolutely vital, IMHO, and the game feels like trash until you've done that. But you'd never even think to do it unless you happened to stumble onto the instructions about it in a forum somewhere.

you need a very decent upstream connection (sans throttling by overzealous ISP's - thats a whole different ballgame) to host a game in the way IW, and perhaps Carmack are suggesting... ie this is from the FAQ of Call Of Duty 2

In Left 4 Dead even if the upstream is adequate (1024kbps) the CPU-strain on an older (AMD X2 4800) computer will cause severe lag. And if the CPU suffices you can bet that half of the people will drop due to routing issues. In what world can most of the gaming population handle their own routers and firewalls? I thought I had all STEAM relevant ports open and routed but some people still drop.

Hosted a L4D server fine w/ a Pentium M 1.6Ghz laptop / 512Mb RAM, which was also running squid+privoxy caching, and a web-ui bittorrent/usenet downloading facility (torrentflux-b4rt to be precise - a php frontend calling transmissioncli and nzbperl and parsing the output back to web via the php scripts).

Having said that, with buddies in the same city and with a fast 2Mb upstream connection (ADSL2+ w/ AnnexM) and v low pings (lower than 20ms) between us via command line, they were getting ~70ms latency IN G

My friends that were in a 80 klick radius could connect to the server and had a low ping normally (20-50) but complained of lag when the horde arrived. I'm guessing that it was due to CPU issues rather than bandwidth.

Most third party players dropped between lobby and loading of the game.

I'm not sure whether you ran a dedicated or a listen server on that Pentium Mobile but I was talking about running a listen server. Being able to run a dedicated server shouldn't be a problem with older machines.

Id suggest that alot of people just dont have the upstream speed to cope with hosting a game... especially those of us in New Zealand, and Australia

Huh? I thought dedicated servers were just that - dedicated servers. A program running among many others on rented servers that have the upload speeds and everything needed to host games without problems.

I feel like I'm either missing something or others don't quite grasp the difference between a game hosted on your PC from your game, a game hosted by the developers, and a game hosted by players on dedicated servers.

RAGE, from what I understand, won't have anything like deathmatches; last I heard, it would have a two-player co-op mode, and some head-to-head racing. Dedicated servers may simply be overkill in that situation. I think this may be a big ado over nothing.

There is way, way, *way* too much of a push away from open, transparent, decentralised internet protocols in pretty much every area, to centralised, proprietary, suit-run messes.

The benefit of being able to run a decentralised server wasn't about doing the gaming equivalent of channel surfing. It was about being able to throw together a LAN in a basement, bedroom, or living room with some local RL friends whenever you wanted.

Yeah, and all of your packets have to go through said remote service as well. If said remote service is hosted in another country, guess how much higher your latency is going to be?

That's not how it works. The central server does matchmaking, but that's about all. The game itself is hosted by one of the clients, with some magic to hand over hosting as clients enter and leave the game. Your game packets do not go through a central server.

So, if the new trend is to lock PC players into closed matchmaking services, wouldn't it start a trend of disgruntled players moding the game into having a satisfactory multiplayer service with dedicated services? Think about it, PC players have already modded single player games into adding entirely a multiplayer service (and quite successfully at that, I'm thinking about GTA San Andreas' two multiplayer mods, MTA SA and SA-MP).

An hypothetical example : Modern Warfare 2. It has both generated epic levels

Or maybe all those modders will get fed up with the proprietary controls and just start learning to write their own games. Could it be a new era for open source games? I haven't really focused on gaming that much lately--especially since all the commercial offerings seem disappointing to me, but from what I've seen, open source games seem to be improving.

Or maybe all those modders will get fed up with the proprietary controls and just start learning to write their own games.

Are you an idiot? I believe you are. How's anyone gonna write anything like MW2 short of having a few hundred of million dollars and hundreds of people working for you? Did you see the 'best' open source FPS out there? They pale in comparison with decade-old Quake III, and they have the advantage of using a pre-made game engine to begin with. Homebrew gamers have a choice : they can ei

Gaming companies don't use millions of dollars and hundreds of people working. They spend millions of dollars to get hundreds of people working for them. Open Source have people volunteer to do the work for free because they enjoy it. What, do you think game companies spend those millions on bricks and steel and machinery and sets for actors?

The main problem with OSS games has been there haven't been enough creative and graphic design people helping out. Have you seen what t

No dedicated servers? Whats next lag that automatically lags with the person with the crappiest connection? No chat features? Sounds like PC gaming is starting to hit the 360 way, I wonder when it will become like the Wii.

Of course we don't need dedicated servers anymore! Consoles and home PCs can totally host 64 player games, I mean, consumer grade internet these days totally has up speeds to match their down speeds. Its not like Modern Warfare 2 will be limited to 9v9 players [kotaku.com].
Wait, I gotta stop being sarcastic, even I'm starting to believe this shit now...
Dedicated are the reason we had 64 player multiplayer back in 2002 [wikipedia.org]. Now, I'm all for progress, but it takes some pretty huge balls to say that ded servers are a relic

Every MP game I've played for more than a week I've spent probably 90% of my game time in a single communities' servers. This goes right back to Quake and stands true today (TF2). Probably >99.999% of that time the server had some kind of mod too.

I'd rather deal with the occasional cheater than suddenly lose multiplayer because the publisher decided the servers were no longer financially viable. This is really about making games disposable, which, for me at least, negates any inherent value received at purchase.

You need some form of advertising. Gamespy was compiling lists of dedicated servers long before this kind of thing was integrated into games. If a game is still popular enough for people to run dedicated servers but not worth financial outlay for the publisher to support then people can still advertise dedicated servers via some mechanism, even if it's just a web forum with a list of IPs...

Yep. The scenario you mentioned is the same one that went through my mind: a couple of generations of gamers goes by and suddenly no one even notices that you have to play on their servers because that's the "standard." Then it'll be you have to pay to play on those servers because bandwith is too costly, or storage or some crap. It's all bollocks, and it's setup to move the industry into a position to capitalize on the only portions where it's not making any money.

Or you talk to a friend online and arrange an impromptu game of RS Vegas 2, and discover that the Ubisoft servers are down and that you have no way to simply create your own server and go. This isn't a fucking MMO, we just wanted to shoot AI bad guys between the two of us.

The tech demo known as Doom 3 also used rendering techniques that only a couple of other tech demos used. These other tech demos used codebases derived from Doom 3. Actual games never even used the Doom 3 codebase, instead other codebases were developed and they used entirely different rendering techniques from Doom 3. The rendering techniques used by the other codebases were also done in a sane manner, unlike Doom 3.